Why choose aluminum profile as heat sink material?
At present, the commonly material for heat sinks on the market is aluminum alloy. In fact, aluminum is not the metal with the best thermal conductivity, silver is the best, followed by copper, and then aluminum.
However, silver is too expensive to be used as heat sink; although copper is bulky, it has advantages in heat dissipation effect and price, and now gradually used as heat sink; aluminum has both thermal conductivity and light weight.
Therefore, It is generally used as the best material for heat sink of electronic parts. Aluminum heat sinks are not 100% pure aluminum, because pure aluminum is too soft, so small amount of other metals are added and cast into aluminum alloys to obtain appropriate hardness, but aluminum still accounts for about 98%.
From the comprehensive consideration of cost and heat dissipation capacity, we often use aluminum alloy as heat sink material.
Pure alumin and Aluminum alloy
(Pictures from the Internet)
Aluminum alloy's advantage
The thermal conductivity indicates the thermal conductivity of the metal.
The larger the thermal conductivity, the lower the thermal conductivity and the greater the thermal conductivity. Among metal materials, silver has the highest thermal conductivity, but the cost is high; pure copper is the second, but it is not easy to process. 6063 T5 aluminum alloy is generally used in air-cooled heatsink because of its good workability, easy surface treatment and low cost.
| Material | Thermal Conductivity |
| 99.9% Silver | 411 W/m.K |
| Pure Copper | 398 |
| Pure Aluminum | 237 |
| 6061 Aluminum Alloy | 155 |
| 6063 Aluminum Alloy | 201 |
Current trends
However, with the increasing demand for heat dissipation, the comprehensive use of various materials with high thermal conductivity has become the general trend. Some heat sinks are made of pure copper or a combination of copper and aluminum.
For example, some heat sinks use pure copper at the bottom to take advantage of copper's large thermal conductivity and relatively large heat transfer, while the fins still use aluminum alloy fins to make the heat exchange area as large as possible for easy processing. , in order to increase the convective heat transfer. However, the biggest difficulty of this method is how to fully connect the copper and aluminum fins. If the connection is not good, the contact thermal resistance will be generated in large quantities, which will affect the heat dissipation effect.
Copper base with aluminum fins
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